Pier-Gabriel Lajoie in Gerontophilia, directed by Bruce La Bruce, part of the 2014 Melbourne Queer Film Festival.

Probably few people in Australia outside the queer cinema audience had heard of Bruce LaBruce before 2010, when his film LA Zombie was bizarrely banned prior to its screening at the Melbourne Film Festival.

LaBruce then had more than his full 15 minutes in the public eye as pundits argued the merits and demerits of a film featuring a blue-faced member of the walking dead who survived by penetrating the open wounds of accident victims with a virile member that looked a bit like a scorpion. His ejaculate, which looked like squid ink, would magically revive them.

I didn't just want to make a queer Harold and Maude. I also wanted to change it up a little bit in terms of the fetish.

Given this was all that happened (about half a dozen times), LA Zombie had the repetitive, surreal quality of a film designed to be shown in galleries rather than in a theatre. That didn't mean it wasn't likely to corrupt and deprave us all, of course. If you're 16 and want to see a film about a serial killer who hangs women on meat-hooks and hacks them to pieces, you go for it; Mr Scorpion-dick, no way.

Director Bruce LaBruce was at the centre of a media storm in 2010 when his film LA Zombie was refused classification in Australia.

Whatever; the fact is that LaBruce's first feature since LA Zombie – he has made several shorts and some television in between – arrives burdened with expectation. How will this gayest of Canadians shock the troops this time?

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Gerontophilia is exactly what the title says it is: LaBruce has, true to presumed form, turned his attention to a sexual orientation that has had almost no airplay and the mere thought of which will likely gross out a lot of the audience.

Young Lake (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie) gets a summer job in a nursing home where the old people are kept sedated much of the time. He forms a bond with an old theatrical hoofer, Mr Peabody (Walter Borden), who is still canny enough not to take his pills; that bond becomes a love affair.

There is nothing here that should gross anyone out; Gerontophilia is a really sweet romance. For the first time, in fact, LaBruce was able to make his film with Canadian government funding and a proper crew.

Will the hard-core fans say he sold out? ''Absolutely,'' says LaBruce gleefully, after his film has shown in Venice with – and this is another first – almost no spluttering walkouts. ''But I always have a romantic element. For example, part of Hustler White, my film about male prostitutes, is that these people indulging in very extreme, crazy fetishes still fall in love and have their hearts broken, so it's not like it's completely alien to me.''

There is an immediate comparison to be made here with Hal Ashby's 1971 trans-generational romance Harold and Maude. LaBruce says he loves Ashby's film. ''But I didn't just want to make a queer Harold and Maude,'' he says. ''I also wanted to change it up a little bit in terms of the fetish of gerontophilia. Lake happens to get a job in an all-male assisted living facility but you have the impression he might be attracted to old women as well. He's attracted to people who are close to death, in a weird way.''

If he had an artistic reference point, he adds, it was probably Lolita.

At the same time, he liked the idea of becoming a Trojan horse, bringing a bit of freewheeling LaBruce sexual iconoclasm right into the rom-com arena. Old people who have or want sex, he observes, are conventionally portrayed as grotesques of one kind or another.

''Either they're cougars, these sexually predatory older women who try to look young and prey on young men, or just old people expressing their sexuality who are then ridiculed. So what if you tried, in perhaps a more mainstream idiom, to show the old person as a credible object of desire? That was part of my intention.''

Whether Lake is gay is irrelevant to LaBruce; in a way, being gay is irrelevant. ''I've never been much of a gay culture kind of guy, you know,'' he says blithely. ''That kind of 'you-are-or-you-aren't gay' identity doesn't make sense to me, because I think it fixes you. It limits people from having a sexual imagination – and that is what my films have always challenged.''

His next film, he adds, takes him right back to the forbidden territory that is the LaBruce stamping ground: it's about a female-to-male transsexual who cuts off men's penises; his flirtation with norm-core is already over.

Much as I like Gerontophilia, I find that a comfort.

Gerontophilia screens from 6.15pm on Thursday at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as part of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival. mqff.com.au